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AMD fglrx 8.42.3 - When will the baby mature ? - Experiences ..

10-23-2007, 06:37 PM

So, since I've been waiting like crazy for this release, I'll post a short summary of my experiences in a new thread. Please reply with your own experiences if you feel like it.. Perhaps in the same form as below:
Hardware: ...
Software: ...
Experiences: Working/not working, better/worse than previous version, problems, etc. As concrete/detailed and non-ranting as possible (well, ranting must be tolerated when it comes to fglrx).

I've been using fglrx 8.42.3 for a couple of hours, installed using standard "--buildpkg Ubuntu/gutsy", manually purging the old debs (8.40.4) before installing the new driver (just to be sure). I had no problems with the installation; libs, DRI-init and everything else worked.

So the driver is working, but it's still a disappointment. But I'll focus on the positive side of things first:

Yup, it's now possible to start compiz, and AIGLX is present, at least.

OpenGL performance (_without_ running compiz) is improved !

Works better than 8.41.7, which I could not use on my hardware (that's OK, it wasn't officially supported on R500-class hardware, anyway).

AIGLX support isn't perfect yet, but it's the first release supporting it, so I'm having hopes that it will be vastly improved in later releases.

That's about it.. Now for the negative stuff:

No working XVideo (!). If I enable any overlay type, I get screen corruption in the upper left corner, consistently, it's a couple of lines, about 25% of the screen width. Video tears diagonally and flickers badly. Disabling video-overlay and opengl-overlay removes the corruption. "TexturedVideo" "true" the same, no help there.

I can no longer use MPlayer with OpenGL output, it's remarkably slow, VSYNC settings have no effect on this (might be mplayer-specific problem, vlc and xine works fine w/ogl).

2D is dog slow without the XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps option. However, this is only when all video-overlay options are disabled. If any video-overlay is enabled, I don't need XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps for decent 2D speed, but the corruption makes that config unusable (*sigh*).

Suspend is still not working, the symptoms are very much like those I had with 8.40.4. But this is rumoured to be because Ubuntu Gutsy uses a kernel with the new SLUB-allocator (replaced older SLAB-allocator), which apparently doesn't play well with fglrx on suspend (on my hardware, at least). Hoping this will get fixed in the next release..

Compiz is definitely accelerated, but too laggy to be usable. Scrolling in gnome-terminal or Firefox is a real PITA. Enabling any kind of video-overlay makes compiz hard-crash on load. Trying to display any video using plain OpenGL output (Xine, vlc) is just a flickering mess, video frame always on-top, with compiz enabled. MPlayer w/gl-output freezes X, if compiz is enabled (SysRQ possible). Tweaking OpenGL VSYNC in AMD control panel does not help in this case. fgl_glxgears segfaults with compiz, glxgears works.

I've observed the ancient/dreaded "[fglrx:firegl_lock] *ERROR* Process 7913 is using illegal context 0x00000005" error messages in the kernel log (but only once). Man, one would think they could get rid of these at some point ??

Still need to use AlwaysRestartServer=true in gdm.conf for stability.

Will have to complete yet another waiting cycle for 8.43, in hope that compiz and/or XVideo might some day work properly on this darned ATI-based lappy of mine, which is otherwise a very nice piece of hardware.

8) 32Bit apps (binaries) like googleearth and secondlife-bin do not run well ATM. But I already had them running with 8.42.3 earlier this evening, so I probably messed up some 32Bit libs / settings during installation hackery

So, as the same driver on the same hardware behaves quite different many of the issues currently blamed exlusively to the driver are really because of different kernels / "Bitness" / compiler / distro / configurations / whatever...

Perhaps we should allow some time to sort out which problems are indeed coming from "the driver" and which from "the environment". Until then, blaming everything on the driver seems a little unfair to me

Comment

I'm really interested in your experiences as I am running a Core 2 Duo with Mobility Radeon X1400 (Debian Testing X86-64). I haven't tried and don't care about the daft wobbly windows in Compiz, I just want working video output!

Xv is blocky and frequently crashes the X-server. OpenGL video output works but the tearing that I managed to get rid of with previous versions of fglrx has returned with a vengeance. I'd be very interested in seeing your xorg.conf file. Could you possibly post it? Also it would be interesting to see your kernel config as I am running 2.6.22 as well.

8) 32Bit apps (binaries) like googleearth and secondlife-bin do not run well ATM. But I already had them running with 8.42.3 earlier this evening, so I probably messed up some 32Bit libs / settings during installation hackery

So, as the same driver on the same hardware behaves quite different many of the issues currently blamed exlusively to the driver are really because of different kernels / "Bitness" / compiler / distro / configurations / whatever...

Perhaps we should allow some time to sort out which problems are indeed coming from "the driver" and which from "the environment". Until then, blaming everything on the driver seems a little unfair to me

The only problem with this release is compiz.
It is choppy and unusable. It takes a lot of CPU.
Has flickering problems with XV and scrolling problems
with firefox. Pop-up windows and drop menus are very slow.

It is the first release with composite extension so
I am waiting for bug fixes in 8.43.

Comment

Aiglx issues: laggs on some functions, and performance decrease is too large overall, some places is it okey, some not.

Playback of video under aiglx is however not possible, without running strange mode which makes windows unmovable of lagg, and video goes slow.

2 issues. 2! wtf :O

This is actually pretty darn alike as the nvidia cards have under linux, they got damn nice aiglx performance though.

anyways. its a good release, and be so damn supportive you can.

I bought ati instead of a nvidia, i love ati, was just that i wanted aiglx, and then i got the amd goes opensource info(the 900 pages thing) and 2 drivers more and i got aiglx, so i supported ati cause they finally makes drivers that can make us linux users happy, and looks like quakewars goes actually better than in windows, i dont got my startlagg anymore.
which was present under windows.

8) 32Bit apps (binaries) like googleearth and secondlife-bin do not run well ATM. But I already had them running with 8.42.3 earlier this evening, so I probably messed up some 32Bit libs / settings during installation hackery

So, as the same driver on the same hardware behaves quite different many of the issues currently blamed exlusively to the driver are really because of different kernels / "Bitness" / compiler / distro / configurations / whatever...

Perhaps we should allow some time to sort out which problems are indeed coming from "the driver" and which from "the environment". Until then, blaming everything on the driver seems a little unfair to me

It seems alot of the problems appear to be coming from Ubuntu. That might be because of some wacky configuration it uses. It has nothing to do with Debian because I'm running Debian with it and it runs great.

Comment

I'd also like to add that when I tried using these in Ubuntu, the driver did install, and I did all the proper things and I still for the life of me could not get it to use the 3d portion of the driver. Went into Debian, installed the driver (pretty much the same way), and it worked right then and there.

I'm going to go back to playing around with the driver now, going to see how movies act with it, and see if I can make it be bad. I'll come back in a little bit and give more results.